The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1) Brad Magnarella (ink book reader txt) 📖

aisle of rolled-down steel doors, business names painted across the top in red Chinese characters. Some were accompanied by Oriental signs against evil. Above, lights glowed in solitary apartment windows.

As I began walking, I noted that the sidewalks were infinitely cleaner than those in the East Village, thanks to the crime syndicate that ran the neighborhood. Besides dealing in the usual vices, the White Hand profited by taxing local businesses and residents for “protection and services,” which evidently included trash pickup. Of course, failure to pay meant your head would be in the next day’s pile.

The White Hand didn’t care for outsiders, either, especially after dark. I would need to tread carefully.

I was on the block where the ward had been triggered. The hunting spell I cooked up had been necessarily hasty—and I’d had to make two of them, the second for the alarm up in the One Forties—but with no rain in the forecast, it had a good chance of holding together.

At that thought, a fish-like force wiggled my cane, tugging me northward. I obliged at a run.

Half a block later, the force twisted me into an alleyway stretching between two restaurants and ending at a Dumpster. Chunks of pavement were piled up against the Dumpster’s brown metal side, as though someone had jack-hammered down to a water main and left the mess for somebody else to clean up. I slowed and sniffed the air. The demon stink from the night before remained a stale after-scent in my sinuses, but it seemed I was picking up a fresh wave.

Not as powerful as the night before, but…

Ahead and to my left was a green door, pieces of glass glinting over its stoop. Beside it lay a twisted window cage. I raised my eyes to the dark socket of a window two floors up. From the jagged outline of broken glass, the same blood-red haze I’d seen the night before was leaking out.

I drew my cane into sword and staff and peered around, heart thumping rabbit-hard in my chest. The alley was still, but whatever had been summoned was loose in the city, dammit.

I blew open the locked green door, entered a narrow stairwell, and ascended quickly. At the second floor, I opened a door off the landing and held out my lit staff.

“Good God,” I muttered.

Inside the apartment’s one room, I assessed the grisly scene at a glance: the spell circles, done in salt this time, the familiar ingredients, the burned parchment, the gunky trail leading beneath the kitchen sink and eventually to the window, where the shrieker had flapped to freedom.

I went to the fallen conjurer.

His mouth was agape, his dark eyes rolled upward, as though trying to see something atop his head. Or maybe he hadn’t wanted to watch what was happening down below. His ribs shone pale white around the hollowed-out bowl of his torso. The shrieker had consumed everything.

With gloved hands, I searched through his pockets for identification. Nothing there, but in a wallet on a back table I found a driver’s license. The face was a match.

“What did you get yourself into, Chin Lau Ping?” I muttered as I copied his name into my notepad.

By his other IDs, I gathered he’d driven an intercity bus. I took a final look at the photo before returning the wallet to the table. The trim-haired man couldn’t have been more different than the East Village vagrant, and yet the two had somehow gotten their hands on the same spell. Despite needing to get to the other summoning, like an hour ago, I made a quick circuit of the apartment.

Something had to link the two.

I stopped at a bamboo bookcase with a mirror on top and shone my light over the titles. But it was the standard amateur fare: religious texts, lay spell books, an encyclopedia of channeling and divination. Nothing that would contain the dark secrets of demon summoning. And why shriekers?

At the window, I peered past the broken frame into the night. I listened for bloody screams but heard only distant car horns and sirens. With any luck, the creature had gone into a second gestation.

I would need to alert the Order of the development, but first I had to get uptown.

I returned to the alley at a run, shoes crunching over the broken window glass. I sensed movement an instant before my vision exploded in stars. The blow only registered as I was landing on my face.

Something solid had struck the back of my head.

14

I twisted and blinked up at my attacker. The looming figure was hard to make sense of. It was as though someone had taken the chunks of pavement beside the Dumpster, assembled them into the proportions of a large human, and endowed them with life. I peeked past the figure. Sure enough, the pavement pile was gone.

Wonderful. I was dealing with a golem.

With a low moan, the golem raised a giant fist. I might or might not have screamed as I threw myself from its trajectory. Pavement exploded behind me. I gained my feet and staggered backwards, sword out. The blow had turned my legs to noodles, but my mental prism remained intact.

“Vigore,” I cried.

The force from my sword destroyed the golem’s right arm, which went knocking down the alleyway. But though the golem rocked back, its legs held fast. It lumbered forward and swung its remaining arm. I got my light shield up in time, but the concussion from the backhand sent me into a brick wall, dealing my head another lovely smack. The alley tilted one way and the other before I could stare it straight again.

“Forza dura!” I shouted.

With my prism wavering, the force wasn’t up to the task of a charging golem. Though chunks blew from its torso, the creature hardly slowed. I wheeled and staggered toward the mouth of the alleyway. I needed some kind of backup, but from whom? The city was sprinkled with magic users, but I had no idea who did and didn’t